interesting synaesthetic facts

1. I fished next to him several times before he grunted at me in salutation one random weekday evening. He wasn’t very friendly. He had the wiper fishing dialed in pretty good and I don’t think he liked seeing all the college town transients fishing his water.

I like to think he approved of my struggling in the wind with a fly rod every day and not catching anything when a lot of other guys were throwing gear. He usually had a fly rod and a hard plastic stripping basket and he was a very good caster. He would make three false casts and shoot all his line. Then he’d tuck his rod under his arm, and with one hand after the other, strip small lengths of line into the stripping basket. The way he did it kind of reminded me of a crab feeding itself slowly.

He was a media coordinator or something like that for NASCAR. He traveled a lot for the races and I suppose it made sense to be based in southern Indiana: Crossroads of America and all that. He had a long, Greek last name. He had dark hair and a serious face. He was maybe in his forties. There were only a couple places to fly fish for wiper without a boat. Whenever I was fishing where he was fishing I thought I did a good job even if I didn’t catch anything.

I saw him using a spinning rod a few times. He was always throwing a Zara Spook. He could huck that thing at least two hundred feet and he’d walk it back slowly and patiently. I never actually saw him hook a fish on it, but just the way the Zara Spook walked was enough to stick in my mind as worthwhile.

I was in Walmart the other day and they had some small white Zara Spooks in the discount bin, $1.50 each. I bought all nine of them. I’m thinking of giving up the fly rod to fish Zara Spooks exclusively.

2. This town in north central Pennsylvania was mainly poor people. Not the working poor, but the actual poor, the Social Security Disability Insurance poor, the extremely skinny and the extremely fat, the people that grocery shop at gas stations. The people that stare unabashedly into your vehicle as you drive down their street and have lots of dogs and cats usually.

The one guy was a clean cut, well built Asian man about forty years old in a new white baseball cap and white golf shirt and khaki shorts putting gas in a clean, white, late model Dodge four-door pick up. A white guy with bad acne scars on his face, a patchy five day gray and black beard, torn up discount white high top sneakers, dirty jeans, dirty shirt, dirty baseball hat stepped out of the gas station, put a cigarette in his mouth, threw his right foot up on the bumper of the truck and retied his shoe lace. And he wasn’t dirty because he had been working all day. He was just dirty.

These two men knew each other and obviously arrived together in the truck and were going to leave together in the truck. The white dude put his foot back on the ground and lit the cigarette and got about two drags in before a tall, skinny, mid-twenties, brown complexioned clerk in a tight blue polo shirt, tight jeans, and European sneakers came out of the station and said in a thick accent seriously, “Hey boss, no smoking, OK? No smoking around the pumps, boss. Thanks, boss.” The clerk had a mustache and a truly majestic pompadour of thick, jet black hair.

3. Hippyman Jeff was a craps dealer in Atlantic City for a while. Every Wednesday night I used to go over to his house and roll dice so he could practice his payouts. We’d sit around his little rinky-dink kitchen table with aluminum legs and those tiny pink and yellow boomerangs all over the top of it and drink cheap wine out of small water glasses and talk about the girls that worked at the diner and wax pseudo-philosophical about random psychological and historical facts.

One night we were sitting there and Jeff said, “Did you know that the cardinal directions were once referred to by color, black for north and red for south? In the northern hemisphere, I’m assuming.”

“I did not know that,” I replied, as I scooped up the dice and shook them in my hand slowly and rhythmically, squinting through the cigaret smoke and privately marveling at how we’re all so good and truly fucked.